State of the Stack v4 – OpenStack In All It’s Glory
I gave the seminal State of the Stack presentation at the OpenStack Summit. This is the 4th major iteration of the deck. This particular version took a very different direction for several reasons: Most of the audience is well steeped in OpenStack and providing the normal “speeds and feeds” seemed pedantic There were critical unaddressed […]
SaaStr on CXO Talk on Friday — Best Enterprise Video Discussions on the Internet
I don’t want to pick favorites, but if you like truly deep dives and you don’t watch CXO-Talk … you should. Michael Krigsman, a fellow Enteprise Irregular and longtime ZDNet columnist, really just comes up with the most amazing guests and terrific conversations. Anyhow I’ll be on this Friday at 12pm PST / 3pm ET if you want […]
Why Most Online Video Companies Will Fail
I live in LA and fund startups. So you can imagine that I see a lot of video startups. Most will fail. I repeat the same mantra to every one I see. “You can’t build a large online video company. You have to build a large online tech company that distributes video.” I try to […]
The Most Misunderstood Facts About Building a Business on YouTube
Any reader of this blog for a period of time will know that I’ve been long YouTube for years. Along with Greycroft, I was the first institutional investor in Maker Studios (sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion) and am still the largest investor in Mitu Network, the largest online video producer of Latino content. […]
How Online Video Companies Can Increase Margin and Build Better Businesses
In my last post I pointed out that many of the media commentators who have criticized the YouTube video network companies as not having strong businesses were mistaken. The main thrust of the post is that with YouTube taking a 45% of revenue and talent taking 70% of the remaining revenue, YouTube Networks didn’t have […]
Why The Media Has Been Wrong About YouTube Networks
For much of 2013 I watched the press write articles about how the YouTube “MCNs” (multi-channel networks) were doomed and tried to square that with the data I was watching at the one I invested in, Maker Studios, who has had one hell of a year. Maker announced it has raised $62 million this year, […]
The Most Interesting Online Video Trend & Where It’s Headed
By now many of you know the Harlem Shake but what you may not appreciate is the broader trend behind the video and it has mirrored my general views on how TV will work in the future Harlem Shake is a YouTube phenomenon that in just 2 weeks has gone from nothing to on air on both […]
A Conversation on Open Cloud–Google+ Hangout
The discussion around open versus closed in the cloud is reaching fever pitch but what does it all mean? Many people have but the loosest understanding of what open cloud means and the differences between open source, open clouds and federated clouds. I’m in the process of writing a paper
Want to Know How to Better Partner With, Raise Money From or Be Acquired by a Big Media Company?
This is one of the best episodes of This Week in VC for a long time. I had the chance to speak with Andrew Siegel who runs corp dev & strategy for Condé Nast (aka Advance Publications). In case you don’t know, they are one of the biggest media companies in the world. They are […]
Google+ Hangouts On Air and SMBs
Yesterday Google unwrapped the Google+ Hangouts on Air to general public with relatively little fanfare. This is part of Google’s social strategy but the product has the potential to disrupt many startups in the space, especially the ones targeting consumers and SMBs. Google could flex their Youtube muscle to literally shove them away. Google+ hangouts […]
Why Socialcam Will Fail*
* Yes, the title of this post is blatant linkbait. But it’s a serious topic. Over the past few days, I mentioned the topic of my post to a number of smart people in the industry, who all had the same reaction: “I don’t get Socialcam, and I want to r…
Facebook, Employers, and your username and password as a federated identity
This has been a very interesting week for employers and Facebook. I have been writing about this story over on Toolbox, here and here if you are interested in reading, but on this site I want to go a little deeper into the idea of asking prospective employees for a username and password to any […]
I wish that Klout allowed for divergent systems
I like Klout; it is an interesting system that can be easily tweaked to work with the major social systems out there. Klout support most of the major systems such as Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, and others to try to put together a bird’s eye view of how your influence and supporters/followers tend to influence others […]
The Enterprise Social Goodness
Ever since the word “social” became a famous consumer token that is overused and overhyped every minute of every day, the business world started wondering about how to build an enterprise social network that had all the right and relevant component…
What Every Entrepreneur Could Learn from Justin Bieber
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. I know what you’re thinking – link bait title, right? Wrong. I will stand 100% behind my assertions in this post. Justin Bieber is unbelievably entrepreneurial and most of you will never know it because he serves a target demo that doesn’t include you. I promise you can […]
